Abstract
The Aceramic Neolithic site of Ganj Dareh (Kermanshah, Iran) is arguably one of the most significant sites for enhancing our understanding of goat domestication and the onset of sedentism. Despite its central importance, it has proven difficult to obtain contextually reliable data from it and integrate the site in regional syntheses because it was never published in full after excavations ceased in 1974. This paper presents the Ganj Dareh archive at Université de Montréal and shows how the documentation and artifacts it comprises still offer a great deal of useful information about the site. In particular, we 1) present the first stratigraphic profile for the site, which reveals a more complex depositional history than Smith's five-level sequence; 2) reveal the presence of two possible pre-agricultural levels (H-01 and P-01); 3) explore the spatial organization of different levels; 4) explain possible discrepancies in the radiocarbon dates from the site; 5) show some differences in lithic technological organization in levels H-01 and P-01 suggestive of higher degrees of residential mobility than subsequent phases of occupation at the site; and 6) reanalyze the burial data to broaden our understanding of Aceramic Neolithic mortuary practices in the Zagros. These data help refine our understanding of Ganj Dareh's depositional and occupational history and recenter it as a key site to improve our understanding the Neolithization process in the Middle East.
Highlights
Western Iran, in particular the central Zagros and its foothills, was from the 1950s to the 1970s, a hotbed of research into the shifts from hunting and gathering to food production [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
To the extent that these patterns of technological organization correspond to some form of techno-typological classification, these results further suggest that more detailed formal analyses of the lithic material from the base of the Ganj Dareh sequence (i.e., Levels P-01, but especially Level H-01) could reveal some important technotypological differences that would break with the overall M’lefaatian character of Ganj Dareh’s lithic technology
The results of this study show the considerable scientific potential of the Ganj Dareh archive at Universitede Montreal to helping us refine our understanding of this site’s human occupational history and, by extensions, of the emergence of the Neolithic in the Central Zagros
Summary
Western Iran, in particular the central Zagros and its foothills, was from the 1950s to the 1970s, a hotbed of research into the shifts from hunting and gathering to food production [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. While Smith never described the ‘virgin soil’ which composes the valley floor over which the site accumulated, he did mention the presence, several meters below it, of a gravel level containing some stone tools and an abundance of (natural?) chert nodules/fragments, which were identified in a single test pit.
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